How a Appalling Rape and Murder Case Was Cracked – 58 Years After.

In the summer of 2023, a major crime review officer, was tasked by her sergeant to review a decades-old murder file. The victim was a elderly woman who had been sexually assaulted and killed in her home city home in the month of June 1967. She was a mother of two, a grandparent, a woman whose previous spouse had been a prominent trade unionist, and whose home had once been a focal point of political activity. By 1967, she was residing by herself, twice widowed but still a well-known presence in her local neighbourhood.

There were no witnesses to her murder, and the initial inquiry unearthed few leads apart from a handprint on a rear window. Police canvassed eight thousand doors and took 19,000 palm prints, but no match was found. The case stayed open.

“When I saw that it was dated 1967, I knew we were only going to solve this through scientific analysis, so I went to the archive to look at the exhibits boxes,” states Smith.

She found a trio. “I opened the first and put the lid back on again immediately. Most of our cold cases are in sterile evidence bags with identification codes. These weren’t. They just had brown cardboard luggage labels indicating what they were. It meant they’d never been subject to modern scientific testing.”

The rest of the day was spent with a colleague (it was his initial day on the job), both wearing protective gloves, securely packaging the items and cataloging what they had. And then there was no progress for another eight months. Smith hesitates and tries to be tactful. “I was very enthusiastic, but it wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm. It’s fair to say there was some doubt as to the worth of submitting something that aged to forensics. It wasn’t seen as a priority.”

It sounds like the opening chapter of a mystery book, or the first episode of a cold case TV drama. The end result also seems the stuff of fiction. In the following June, a 92-year-old man, Ryland Headley, was found guilty of Louisa Dunne’s rape and murder and sentenced to life.

An Unprecedented Investigation

Covering 58 years, this is believed to be the longest-running cold case closed in the United Kingdom, and possibly the globe. Later that year, the unit won an award for their work. The whole thing still feels extraordinary to her. “It just doesn’t feel real,” she says. “It’s forever giving me chills.”

For Smith, cases like this are confirmation that she made the correct career choice. “He thought policing was too dangerous,” she says, “but what could be better than solving a 58-year-old murder?”

Smith joined the police when she was in her twenties because, she says: “I’m nosy and I was fascinated by people, in assisting them when they were in crisis.” Her previous role in child protection involved demanding hours. When she saw a job advert for a cold case investigator, she decided to apply. “It looked really engaging, it’s more of a regular hours role, so here I am.”

Examining the Clues

Smith’s job is a civilian role. The specialist unit is a small group set up to look at cold cases – murders, sexual assaults, long-term missing people – and also review live cases with fresh eyes. The original team was tasked with collecting all the old case files from around the area and moving them to a new secure storage facility.

“The Louisa Dunne files had originated in a precinct, then, in the years since 1967, they were transferred to multiple locations before finally coming here,” says Smith.

Those containers, their contents now forensically bagged, returned to storage. Towards the end of 2023, a new lead detective arrived to head up the team. The new officer took a different approach. Once an engineer, Marchant had made a drastic change on his career path.

“Solving problems that are hard to solve – that’s my engineering mindset – trying to think in new ways,” he says. “When Jo told me about the box, it was an absolute no-brainer. Why wouldn’t we give it a go?”

The Breakthrough

In television shows, once items are sent off to forensics, the results come back in days. In actuality, the submission process and testing take many months. “The forensic team are keen, they want to do it, but our work is always slightly on the lower priority,” says Smith. “Current investigations have to take precedence.”

It was the end of August 2024 when Smith received a message that forensics had a full DNA profile of the assailant from the victim’s clothing. A few hours later, she got another message. “They had a match on the DNA database – and it was someone who was still alive!”

Ryland Headley was 92, a widower, and living in Ipswich. “When we realised how old he was, we didn’t have the time to waste,” says Smith. “It was all hands on deck.” In the period between the DNA match and Headley’s arrest, the team read every single one of the thousands original statements and records.

For a while, it was like living in two time periods. “Just looking at all the photos, seeing an old lady’s house in 1967,” says Smith. “The witness statements. The way they describe people. Today, it would typically be different. There are so many changes over time.”

Getting to Know the Victim

Smith felt she came to understand the victim, too. “She was such a prominent person,” she says. “Lots of people were saying that they saw her outside her home every day. She was twice widowed, separated from her family, but she wasn’t reclusive. She had a group of women who used to meet and gossip – and those were the women who realised something was very wrong.”

Most of the team’s days were spent reading and summarising. (“Humongous amounts of paperwork. It wouldn’t make compelling television.”) The team also spoke with the doctor, now eighty-nine, who had attended the scene. “He remembered every detail from that day,” says Smith. “He said: ‘I’ve been a doctor all my life and seen a lot of dead bodies but that’s the only one that had been murdered. That haunts you.’”

A History of Crimes

Headley’s prior offenses seemed to leave little question of his guilt. After the 1967 murder, he had moved, and in the late 1970s he had admitted to raping two older women, again in their own homes. His victims’ harrowing statements from that previous case gave some insight into the victim’s last moments.

“He menaced to choke one and he threatened to suffocate the other with a pillow,” says Smith. Both women resisted. Though Headley was initially sentenced to life, he challenged the verdict, supported by a mental health professional who stated that Headley was acting out of character. “It went from a life sentence to less time,” says Smith.

Securing Justice

Smith was there for Headley’s arrest. “I knew what he looked like, I knew he was going to be 92, and I also knew how compelling the proof was,” she says. The team were concerned that the arrest would trigger a health crisis. “We were uncovering the most hidden truth he’d kept hidden for sixty years,” says Smith.

Yet everything was able to proceed. The court case took place, and the victim’s living relative had been identified and approached by specialist officers. “She had believed it was never going to be resolved,” says Smith. For the family, there had also been a stigma about the nature of the crime.

“Rape is often not reported now,” says Smith, “but in the mid-20th century, how many older women would ever report this had happened?”

Headley was told at sentencing that, for all practical purposes, he would never be released. He would die in prison.

A Profound Effect

For Smith, it has been a special case. “It just feels different, I don’t know why,” she says. “In a live case, the process is very reactive. With this case you’re driving the inquiry, the urgency is only from yourself. It started with me trying to get someone to take some notice of that box – and I was able to see it through right until the end.”

She is certain that it is not the last resolution. There are about 130 unsolved investigations in the archives. “We’ve got so much more to do,” she says. “We have several murders that we’re reviewing – we’re constantly submitting evidence to forensics and following other leads. We’ll be forever unlocking the past.”